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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

Eugene Ionesco

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Eugene Ionesco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: November 26
Died: 1994
Died: March 28
Diarist
Dramatist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Stanwood
Washington
Ionesco
Eugen Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
Absurd
Ridiculous
Painful
Seems
World
Grotesque

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
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The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.
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It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.
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All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.
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When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.
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We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
Eugene Ionesco
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The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugene Ionesco
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?
Eugene Ionesco
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Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco
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Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
Eugene Ionesco
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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Ionesco
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The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
Eugene Ionesco
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Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
Eugene Ionesco
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
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You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
Eugene Ionesco
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Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of déjà vu, when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
Eugene Ionesco